Federal officer arrested in string of fatal shootings

New York Times

May 6, 2016

Police suspect that the same man, a federal law enforcement officer, committed three shootings Thursday and Friday, killing three people and wounding three others in the Maryland suburbs of Washington.

Police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, said Eulalio Tordil fatally shot his estranged wife, Gladys Tordil, on Thursday afternoon and fled. While police searched for him Friday, shootings were reported at two locations in Montgomery County: Potomac and Aspen Hill.

Eulalio Tordil, 62, was arrested without incident Friday afternoon in Aspen Hill, across the street from the third shooting, in the parking lot of a mini mall where officers had spotted the car he was reported driving.

Plainclothes officers watched him for over an hour as he went in and out of shops and ate lunch. They waited until he walked back to the car, away from bystanders. At that point, witnesses told local TV stations, several unmarked police vehicles swooped in and boxed him in, and officers jumped out with guns drawn.

“We do have reason to believe that this incident and the one in Aspen Hill, potentially the one in Prince George’s County, was, in fact, related.” Assistant Chief Darryl McSwain said at the site of the shooting in Potomac.

Gladys Tordil, 44, had obtained a protective order against her husband, who works for the Federal Protective Service, a police force that guards federal facilities.

On Thursday afternoon, when Gladys Tordil drove to a Beltsville high school to pick up her children, her husband followed her, got out of his car and confronted her in the parking lot, Prince George’s police said.

A bystander tried to intervene, but Eulalio Tordil shot him, shot his wife multiple times as she sat in her SUV and drove off, police said. The man who tried to help her was taken to a hospital and was expected to survive.

About 11 a.m. Friday, three people were shot in mall parking lot, with one man killed and a man and a woman wounded, Montgomery County police said. The wounded man was in critical condition, police said, while the woman’s injury was not life-threatening.

Less than an hour later and a few miles away, a woman was shot and killed in the parking lot of a supermarket in Aspen Hill.